He spent 10 days in jail after facial recognition software led to the arrest of the wrong man, lawsuit says

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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include a statement from the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office.

When Nijeer Parks walked out of a New Jersey prison in 2016, he returned to his family in Paterson and told them he was done messing up his life.

Twice convicted for selling drugs, Parks spent six years behind bars and said he decided after his release to earn an honest living. He found a job as a clerk at the local PriceRite, began saving money and made plans to marry his fiancé.

So when police last year filed numerous charges against Parks stemming from a shoplifting incident at a Woodbridge hotel in which the suspect hit a police car before fleeing the scene, the ex-convict who had worked eagerly to repair his life, tried just as hard to clear his name.

“I had no idea what this was about. I’d never been to Woodbridge before, didn’t even know for sure where it was,” Parks told NJ Advance Media last week.

“I’ve never even been to Middlesex County besides going to a Rutgers University football game,” Parks said.

Parks didn’t drive a car, didn’t have a license and had to ask his cousin to drive him to the Woodbridge police station, after he learned police had a warrant for his arrest.

Moments after he arrived, he said, he was in handcuffs and later confronted by detectives who told him repeatedly, “You know what you did.”

Before everything was over, Parks would spend 10 days in jail, all of his life savings, and the next year fighting to clear his name.

Parks attorney, Daniel Sexton of Jersey City, filed suit against the township, the police department and public officials, including Mayor John McCormac, alleging investigators violated his clients rights by relying on facial recognition software that has since been banned by the state.

A spokesman for the mayor said the township had not yet seen the civil complaint and could not comment.

NiJeer Parks, of Paterson, in mugshots taken after his arrest in Woodbridge.Photos courtesy of Daniel Sexton

Investigators relied on facial recognition software that has since been banned in New Jersey to identify Parks as a suspect in crimes that occurred the afternoon of Jan. 26, 2019, at the Hampton Inn hotel on Route 9 North in Woodbridge.

The software, which was created by Clearview Al, was criticized for its heavy reliance on billions of social media photos to identify criminal suspects.

According to court documents obtained by NJ Advance Media, the suspect shoplifted candy and other snacks from the hotel gift shop and darted into a men’s room after a hotel staffer called police.

When two officers arrived, the man handed over a driver’s license from Tennessee identifying him as Jamal Owens.

But police ran the name through the computer in the patrol car and determined the license was not valid and possibly fraudulent, according to the report.

When the police pulled out their handcuffs to arrest the man, he fled out the back door of the hotel, losing a sneaker on the way.

Outside, the man jumped into a black Dodge Challenger as officers drew their firearms and told him to stop, but he took off, causing an officer to jump out of the way, the report states.

He crashed into the back of a patrol car and a column outside the hotel before speeding out onto Route 9, an officer wrote.

One of the officers followed the car, but lost sight of it. The vehicle was later found abandoned in a Woodbridge parking lot.

The day after the hotel crimes, investigators in New York and New Jersey notified Woodbridge police they had a “high profile” match to the photo, after running it through a facial recognition system that compares the image to photos of other suspects, such as ex-convicts, whose pictures were on file in police and FBI databases.

The suspect was identified as Parks and warrants were issued in his name, charging him with numerous offenses including shoplifting, false government document and resisting arrest. He was later charged with aggravated assault with a weapon, a weapons offense and leaving the scene of an accident.

Police said they checked several addresses in Paterson in an attempt to arrest Parks, but couldn’t find him.

Investigators scanned the photo on this fraudulent driver's license to match the suspect's face with Nijeer Parks, according to court documents.Photo courtesy of Daniel Sexton

On Jan. 30, 2019, Parks received a troubling call from his grandmother. Police officers had been to her Paterson home and said they had a warrant for his arrest, according to his lawsuit.

A few days later, Parks asked his cousin to drive him to Woodbridge “in order to clear up what he knew to be a matter of mistaken identity,” the lawsuit says.

As his cousin waited in the car outside for four hours, Parks said he spoke with the front desk officer in an attempt to clear his name, but was soon approached by multiple officers.

“They handcuffed me, then they took me to the interrogation room. A little room,” Parks said. “They arrested me before the interview. They already had in mind they were arresting me.”

Inside, police showed him photos of the damaged Dodge Challenger and kept saying “You know what you did,” according to Parks.

He asked for a lawyer, then was taken to a hallway where he was handcuffed to a bench. About an hour later, the officers – he counted seven – told him they were going to take him to a different room for more questions.

The lawsuit states that the room where they wanted to take him for additional questioning didn’t have any cameras and that Parks grew fearful for his safety.

Parks said he feigned an asthma attack. After a brief emergency room visit, he was lodged in the Middlesex County Jail, where he said he remained for the next 10 days before posting bail.

He said after speaking with his fiancé, they decided to drain their joint savings bank account and pay an attorney $7,500 to take the case to trial.

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office offered Parks a deal: In exchange for a guilty plea, he would serve six years in prison with no early release until he’d served 85 percent of his sentence. He would also be on parole for three years after his release.

If he went to trial, the prosecutor intended to seek a sentence of 20 years or more based on his previous criminal history, Parks said.

“I did have a background, but I’d been home since 2016 and I had been in no trouble,” Parks said.

“The whole thing scared the living heck out of me. I’ve been trying to do the right thing with my life,” he said.

After three or four court appearances over a year, Parks said a Superior Court judge began pressuring the prosecutor’s office to produce more evidence in the case beyond just the facial recognition software.

“She told them she didn’t want to come back to court until they had solid evidence,” Parks said. A few months after that hearing, Parks said he received a letter from the prosecutor’s office dismissing the charges.

Parks’ attorney argues that police and prosecutors — armed with only the facial recognition evidence from New York-based company Clearview Al — relentlessly pursued his client for nearly a year.

The software was used in the arrests of 19 men in New Jersey who police say tried to lure children for sex. Earlier this year, however, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal ordered police and prosecutors to stop using the facial recognition technology after questions were raised about how the company receives and protects its data.

According to the attorney general’s office, in January Attorney General Gurbir Grewal announced a moratorium on using Clearview AI in law enforcement investigations, while the Division of Criminal Justice evaluated both Clearview AI and other facial recognition products, and developed a policy governing the use of this technology and specific products. That evaluation and review continues and the moratorium remains in place.

According to the Clearview Al, comparisons are made when the software pulls photos from the “open web” such as public social media accounts, adding millions of faces to the database every day.

The combination of people dumping personal information online and a general lack of regulation threatens people’s ability to walk outside without being watched, Helen Nissenbaum, an information sciences professor at Cornell Tech, told NJ Advance Media earlier this year.

The use of facial recognition to identify people in public is “not compatible with a free society,” she said.

Sexton said the software clearly led to his client’s false arrest.

“The mistaken identity was solely based on facial recognition software that is illegal in the state now and was always known to be faulty,” the attorney said.

“No actual evidence supported the charges against my client,” Sexton said in an interview with NJ Advance Media. “No fingerprints or DNA, no blood type.”

Sexton filed the complaint as a civil rights lawsuit, blaming “anti-black animus (as) a substantial motivating factor leading to the wrongful” arrest.

“Racial profiling is considered to be an equal protection claim, essentially that (Parks) was detained, arrested and charged primarily because he is or appears racially African-American,” the suit states.

The suit also claims excessive force, false imprisonment and cruel and unusual punishment, and seeks compensatory and punitive damages for physical and emotional pain and suffering.

In addition to Woodbridge police officers, Parks is suing the police director, the township’s mayor, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and the county jail.

None of those named as defendants in the lawsuit have responded to requests for comments.

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Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Dominisi on December 28th, 2020 at 21:31 UTC »

All Facial Rec software is supposed to do is give a lead, and not be used as the basis for prosecution/arrest. This is on the police officers who decided to use it in this way.

Edit: This blew up. Some backstory.

I used to work for law enforcement as an Intelligence Analyst who used Facial Rec software for the very purpose of trying to generate leads off of shitty photos of surveillance videos. It was ALWAYS supposed to be used as only a lead, and was not allowed to be used to arrest somebody just off of a "Probable" match.

And that's all it ever was, probable, I never would, and was never allowed to call it a "match" because you couldn't ever guarantee it. And out of thousands and thousands of these I did, I can only recall maybe 2 or 3 that I felt confident enough in to pass along as a "probable match".

Edit2:

Just to clear up a common thing I'm seeing. When you put in a photo, it doesn't just spit back another photo and declare its a match. It gives you back a collage of dozens of DMV photos of basically people that "look similar" its up to a human to look at that collage and try and find a probable match. The amount of times I would put in a hispanic male in his 50s and get a teenage white girl as a possible match in the collage was wayyy higher than it should have been.

kissimakk on December 28th, 2020 at 20:30 UTC »

They don’t even look the same.

They’re just black with goatees.

wesleyplaysmtg on December 28th, 2020 at 20:28 UTC »

Anyone using facial recognition systems to seriously impact a person's life is either completely oblivious to, or knowingly ok with, the serious racial biases that are a known attribute of said systems.

Either of which is completely unacceptable. In a sane and just world, I believe that the prosecutors who used this as evidence and the executives at Clearview would be held liable for this extreme negligence.